Our View: Experience matters, so Jim Gitz is best choice for Freeport mayor

Freeport’s unemployment rate and crime rate are too high, its buildings are too dilapidated, its roads are too bumpy.

Journal Standard

Writer

Posted Apr. 7, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Apr 7, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Posted Apr. 7, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Apr 7, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Freeport’s unemployment rate and crime rate are too high, its buildings are too dilapidated, its roads are too bumpy.

To fix serious issues, the city needs experienced leadership with an eye toward making changes in the way City Hall operates. We think Jim Gitz has the best blend of the qualities to move Freeport out of its economic doldrums.

Gitz, who was mayor from 1997 to 2005, is not a return to the old way of doing business. He left Freeport and became city attorney in Urbana and left there to be city administrator in Prairie du Chien, Wis.

Those experiences have helped Gitz see how other communities operate, to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Freeport has the ability to fix itself, but borrowing best practices from other cities can expedite the process. Gitz is committed to discovering best practices and implementing them where needed.

He also has solid, specific plans to increase entrepreneurship, a key to increasing employment opportunities. During his previous years as mayor, he supported crime-fighting efforts by instituting a Civilian Police Academy and Junior Civilian Police Academy.

As mayor, he started the city’s first five-year capital improvement plan. Anyone who has driven around the city knows how important it is to have such a plan. Such plans need to be public so taxpayers can see what’s getting fixed and how much it costs, something Gitz said he intends to do.

We’d like to see the plan posted on the city’s website, preferably with a link from the home page.

We think Gitz’s political connections with Gov. Pat Quinn and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin would help Freeport get the state and federal money it needs. That’s not a handout — it’s taxpayer money coming back to the community.

Freeport needs to clean itself up to attract business. Cleanups, however, are not free.

Gitz’s experience can help him find financing options that would make rehabbing old downtown buildings viable.

There’s no questioning the passion his opponents have for the community. The candidates agree on what the city’s problems are but have different approaches on how to solve them.

Independent Kathy Knodle promises a more people-friendly City Hall but with minor adjustments to how it operates. People’s Party candidate Jon Staben would make “significant changes,” an interesting idea that often is difficult to execute because of the entrenched bureaucracies involved.

Gitz’s course is the middle ground. Making changes and retaining the people and policies that work. We think that’s the best fit.

We don’t doubt that Knodle and Staben could learn on the job, but we don’t think Freeport can afford the time the learning process requires.

Page 2 of 2 - In the campaign’s closing days, Gitz has been the target of a smear campaign engineered by a shadowy group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Freeport. The attacks did nothing to shake our judgment that Gitz is the man for the mayor’s office.

The anonymous nature of the smears speaks volumes about whoever is behind them, however.

The city needs a leader who can step in immediately, make the needed changes, make the connections and make the deals that will help Freeport live up to its potential.